loud paper

tackling tactics

via Center for Tactical Magic

This week I hosted a Glass House Conversation, asking: "What tactics have emerged in architecture and design since the financial crisis? What’s the operational mode of the bust, or how do we work now?"

The answers were varied, personal, and for the most part went beyond the standard cliches of architectural practice. By looking at the tactical side of recessionary practice, the conversation re-evaluated the vocabulary architects and designers use to explain what they do. I was surprised at the acknowledgment of the messy issues of interdisciplinary practice and, even thought the term "expanded architect" is a bit overkill at moment, the variety of roles designers are taking on—entrepreneur, cultural capitalist, publisher, NGO— and the kinds of projects, small and large, they're tackling.

I was also surprised that at a point in history where cynicism would be forgiven, the answers were forward thinking, not nihilistic. Bryan Boyer wrote: "I look to skills such as negotiation, translation, and optimism as survival tactics in the post-2008 era. I’m taking tactics to mean skills or maneuvers that can be developed through practice. Even optimism needs to be practiced every now and then."

The question is one I lifted from the first Interventionist Toolkit piece over at Places Journal. And I'll be presenting the Interventionist Toolkit research to the Right to the City symposium in Sydney at the end of next week as part of a panel entitled "Tactics for DIY Cities." And the question from above plays a role as I look at how recessionary-era work employs tactics of DIY and arts activism to create urban change. I’m also very excited to share the panel with artist Marjetica Potrč. I can’t wait to hear more about her current projects that blend art installations with social justice and infrastructural thinking.
 
Finally, the second in my series is online: The Interventionist's Toolkit: Posters, Pamphlets and Guides. It highlights some great work from The Hypothetical Development Organization, Candy Chang, Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (everyone should download A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible), the Center For Urban Pedagogy's Making Policy Public series, Studio X and Gavin Browning, and The Center for Tactical Magic, among others.

Here's a snippet:

...Or consider A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible, published by the arts group Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination to correspond with the Long Weekend, an action organized by Arts Against Cuts and held at Goldsmiths college in London in early December 2010. The event was held to protest Prime Minister David Cameron’s reduction of government funding for British higher education, a spending cut of nearly 40 percent that targeted arts, humanities and social sciences while protecting the budgets of science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs. Held just days before a major MP vote, the 48-hour event offered a series of resistance workshops. The downloadable user’s guide presented a history of art activist strategies. Included were interventionist examples such as The Tactical Ice Cream Unit; created by The Center for Tactical Magic, the TICU is an ice cream van that not only serves up scoops but also distributes radical literature to local communities and acts as a grassroots mobile communications hub. Another project profiled in the guide is the mid-1960s project, The Free Store; created in the mid-1960s by the Diggers (a group of San Francisco artists and actors, and later called the Free City Collective), the Free Store used tactics that we now see as familiar: it occupied an abandoned storefront, and inside, it distributed goods, food and health services for free or exchange. Recognizing the incendiary nature of the pamphlet, User's Guide authors Gavin Grindon and John Jordan write: "This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It's a match struck in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies of those who took Bertolt Brecht’s words to heart: 'Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.'"

Read more here.

the interventionist's toolkit

Sit In, Toxteth, Liverpool, by What If. [photo via Canadian Centre for Architecture]

On Monday, Places Journal posted the first in a four-part series entitled The Interventionist's Toolkit: Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism. In the piece I ask "What is the operational mode of the bust?" and then track the different practices that have cropped up in the last few years. These are ways of working that combine design with activist and grassroots tactics.

As we head into spring I'll add more thoughts and examples to the Toolkit. But here's a taste of the first installment:

...Previous economic crises have offered up examples: paper architecture, the growth of theoretical and artistic practice, in the 1970s and '80s; the lost generation, young designers leaving the architecture for virtual realms, in the '90s; and paperless architecture, the rise of formal digital experimentation, in the early '00s....

Our current recession is inspiring its own strategies and tactics: It's increasingly a catch-all for a host of urban interventions. This is a trend that I like to describe with a mouthful of a title: Provisional, Opportunistic, Ubiquitous, and Odd Tactics in Guerilla and DIY Practice and Urbanism. With this verbaciousness, I hope to capture the tactical multiplicity and inventive thinking that have cropped up in the vacuum of more conventional commissions. These days vacant lots offer sites for urban farming, mini-golf, and dumpster pools. Trash recycles into a speculative housing prototype (see the Tiny Pallet House). Whether it’s The Living’s Amphibious Architecture or Mark Shepard's Serendipitor, the built environment speaks through mobile devices. Retail spaces hit by the recession are fodder for reinvention, as the art organization No Longer Empty transforms unleased storefronts into temporary galleries. Even the street itself is reclaimed. REBAR’s annual initiative, Park(ing) Day, urges global participants to use a pranksters wit to turn parking spaces into pocket parks, one quarter at a time.

Driven by local and community issues and intended as polemics that question conventional practice, these projects reflect an ad hoc way of working; they are motivated more by grassroots activism than by the kind of home-ec craft projects (think pickling, Ikea-hacking and knitting) sponsored by mainstream shelter media, usually under the Do-It-Yourself rubric. (Although they do slot nicely into the imperative-heavy pages of Good and Make magazines.) They are often produced by emerging architects, artists and urbanists working outside professional boundaries but nonetheless engaging questions of the built environment and architecture culture. And the works reference edge-condition practitioners of earlier generations who also faced shifts within the profession and recessionary outlooks: Gordon Matta Clark, Archigram, Ant Farm, the early Diller + Scofidio, among others....

....Still, there’s a tendency to dismiss these kinds of projects as simply whimsical — to smile at their authenticity or their expression of clever détournement, but at the same time to suppress any uncomfortable restive rumblings. But these projects hold at their heart a belief that change is possible despite economic or political obstacles, or disciplinary or institutional inertia. And the prospect for real change builds as more and more works accumulate in exhibition catalogues and digital venues. Broadcast via Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and design blogs, these new temporary or provisional projects can be read relationally to each other without explicit contextual concerns. By aggregating and focusing upon these small-scale interventions, my hope is to reveal a larger framework — a network that makes nimble use of social networking and Web 2.0 technologies to transform local episodes into global outreach. Thus The Interventionist’s Toolkit — a series that will light upon Places from time to time this winter and spring — is not necessarily about featuring projects, but about finding new ways to practice and provoke within the fields of architecture, urbanism, and design.

Keep reading.